Heir apparent?
Meet UPMC executive Liz Concordia, who may someday lead the region's health care powerhouse.
By Geoffrey W. Melada
When Liz Concordia welcomes this visitor to her cavernous office in UPMC Shadyside Hospital - one of three such offices strategically placed throughout the corridors of UPMC power in Shadyside, Oakland and downtown Pittsburgh - she bypasses an opportunity to show off the trappings of life in the executive suite. There are impressive full-color drawings of future UPMC buildings on display, wall-to-wall windows looking onto bustling Centre Avenue and accolades enough to fill the entire length of the room, but Concordia ignores these things. Instead, she leads me to a cork board hanging behind her desk, to which she has pinned at least 100 photos of her husband, Michael Concordia, and their three children - Erica, 11, Mike, 13, and Alexis, 15. Concordia calls this her "priority board." From the moment you meet her, it's clear that she's a corporate executive cut from a different mold.
Concordia arrived in Pittsburgh eight years ago as president of UPMC's flagship Presbyterian and Shadyside hospitals. Now, as president of the hospital and community-services division, she's in charge of all 20 UPMC hospitals, including the Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh, which UPMC took over last year. Concordia is one of the health care enterprise's four executive vice presidents reporting directly to president and CEO Jeffrey Romoff. (The others are Diane Holder, president of UPMC health plan; Charles Bogosta, president of UPMC's international and commercial services; and Dr. Marshall Webster, president of UPMC's physician services division.)
Ever since Concordia arrived, people have speculated at cocktail parties and in newspaper articles about whether she will be tapped as Romoff's successor. UPMC declined to comment on the speculation. At 63, Romoff, a Hampton resident who has built UPMC into one of the most respected health enterprises in the country as well as the region's largest employer, has announced no plans to retire and doesn't appear to be slowing down. UPMC recently expanded into Europe and the Middle East, where it now operates ventures such as hospitals, cancer clinics and organ-transplant centers in Ireland, Italy and Qatar as well as other services in the United Kingdom.
However, according to a one-time UPMC insider, Congressman Jason Altmire (D-PA), the health conglomerate's former government-relations officer, "I think it was the plan when she was hired that she was the eventual successor. When she first got there, certainly there was a feeling that there were bigger things planned for her." Altmire went on to say, "I don't want to say that there were hard feelings when she arrived, but people had questions. She was young, and people asked what all the hoopla was for and whether she was up to the task. She has proven that she is."
In many ways, Concordia, 45, is exactly what you'd expect in a high-ranking business executive. She is energetic, confident and highly organized. You'd have to possess those qualities in order to oversee 20 hospitals and manage 24,000 employees and billions of dollars in operating revenue.
Yet, in other ways, she doesn't fit the mold - especially these days, with some corporate chieftains making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Concordia is one of Pittsburgh's highest paid executives (receiving $1.2 million in salary for fiscal year 2007, according to IRS filings), but still, she knows the names and life stories of the janitors who clean the hospitals she runs and introduces herself simply as "Liz Concordia" sans either of her impressive titles.
Much has been written about her record over the past eight years, specifically about the acquisitions that she has overseen. Under her watch, UPMC merged with the historic Mercy Hospital. In 2002, only one year after she arrived, UPMC opened the $104 million, 335,000-square-foot Hillman Cancer Center, which the health system plans to further expand along the Baum-Centre corridor in the city's East End.
Although there's been much ink about Concordia the health care executive, there's been less about her as a person. Some of those closest to her express disappointment with some of the news coverage Concordia has received over the years, how some profiles of her tend to abandon their subject in favor of broader criticism of UPMC, or what one colleague describes as "evil empire" stories.
Of course, UPMC, like any large, influential organization, has its critics, but articles about Concordia that focus on UPMC's balance sheet miss the point, say friends, revealing little about what makes Concordia interesting in her own right - including the level of success she has achieved as a woman in a region still bemoaned by some as an old-boys' club and the balance she has perfected between work and family.
"She can do in one day what most people can do in one week," observes Connecticut antiques dealer Lisa Swotes, a close friend of Concordia's since their undergraduate days at Duke University in North Carolina in the early-1980s. What's the secret to her success? Concordia explains that in one word: "Efficiency." She is of German ancestry after all, she quips (and she speaks the language fluently).
But behind that simple, one-word answer is a more complicated formula - part discipline, part sacrifice and part good old-fashioned luck. Concordia starts her day early. After getting the kids ready for school, she is in her car by 7 a.m. and en route to one of her offices for meetings with hospital administrators or faculty physicians. Forget power lunches at The Carlton or The Capital Grille; Concordia doesn't slow down enough for lunch. "She doesn't watch TV or read magazines," says Swotes. "She has no idea what's going on in pop culture. After work, she gets home for her family. She gives them 100 percent."
Of her children, Concordia says this: "There are only a certain number of years that I can influence them. I want to be at home. If you want to know what's going on with them, you have to be there to help with quizzes and homework."
That means skipping the evening functions - the awards dinners, fundraisers and galas - that are a routine part of life for many executives at her level, as well as forgoing many opportunities to sit on other organizations' boards of directors. She recently made an exception, becoming a trustee of Shady Side Academy, but she did so because, she says, she has a vital stake in the success of the Pittsburgh private school - all three of her children attend there.